Posted by Don on February 23, 1999 at 22:05:58:
In Reply to: The price of drugs posted by james c on February 23, 1999 at 03:09:00:
Keep in mind that pharmaceutical companies are not just in the business to provide low-cost medicine to consumers. These companies have responsibilities to their sotckholders and employees as well as customers.
It usually takes many years and many millions of dollars to develop a new drug that can pass muster with all of the world's regulatory agencies. The FDA is one of the strictest. Because of the requirement that companies satisfy the FDA, the true cost of discovering, developing, manufacturing, and marketing new drugs is grossly inflated. Also not every compound discovered or invented makes it to the market; these 'failures' cost money and unfortunately the costs of these 'failures' must be made by the profits from those drugs that do make it the market.
Some of the profits gained are reinvested in research and development for other safer and more effective drugs. This increased R&D spending may eventually result in discovery of a cure to stop CH forever - not just drugs like the ones we have available now to stop a CH in its tracks or a long-term medication to help prevent reoccurrence.
One thing that we must hope for is greater competition. Imitrex drove drugs like Ergostat off the market. Fortunately today we are seeing more triptans getting approval such as Zomig. Competition will help to drive prices down. But, again, the regulatory process imposes such harsh restrictions and excessive costs that it is often difficult for the 'little guy' to compete. We need more 'little guys' to help put the squeeze on prices so we as consumers can better afford the drugs we need.
Regarding patents - in the US patents are valid for 17 years from time of discovery. It will often take several years from discovery until a drug hits the market. I don't know when sumatriptan's patent began, but the first formulation of sumatriptan in the US was approved in 1993. It was probably several years earlier that the patent was granted. So we may be looking at a patent expiration in 2007 or thereabouts. At that time we will see generics hit the market, which will help greatly to lower prices. That's too far off in the future and doesn't help us now, so we need other solutions. One thing to watch out for is that many of the big players are contributing lots of money to politicians hoping to get them to approve legislation to extend patent protection to 17 years from when they first get approval to market the drug. This has the potential to add up to 10 years before there will be competition from generics.
In a strange sort of way we need to be thankful that there is a fairly large population of migraine sufferers. Without them there would be much less incentive for the pharmaceutical companies to continue to pursue this line of research that benefits us clsuterheads as well.